The Quest of the Simple Life eBook

secret to himself; often enough he visits it so rarely
that his face is not known among his tenants.
No; but he must have everything to himself; he must
round off his estate; he must look from his park on
nothing which is not his; for your rural Ahab could
not sleep with a Naboth’s little vineyard even
a mile away. It is useless to tell him that
the land you want is waste natural land, on which
you propose to confer value; he prefers that it shall
be valueless, rather than that it shall be yours.
Before population can be re-distributed to the advantage
of town and country alike, this difficulty must be
overcome. It can only be overcome by drastic
legislation. Compulsory purchase, regulated by
an equitable land court, is the only remedy; and it
is hard that Irishmen should have, and grumble over,
privileges which their English brethren would receive
with open arms.

Such were some of the discoveries which I made when
I came to the real business of finding a humble country
residence. In my ignorance and inexperience
it had seemed the easiest thing in the world.
After a fortnight of experiment I began to think
it was the hardest.

CHAPTER VII

I FIND MY COTTAGE

In the meantime a circumstance had occurred which
was of great importance to me. Some enterprising
spirits had started a new weekly local paper, and—­mirabile
dictu—­they actually contemplated a
literary page! With a faith in suburban culture,
so unprecedented as to be almost sublime, these daring
adventurers proposed giving their readers reviews
of books, literary gossip, and general information
about the doings of eminent writers. They offered
the work to me at the modest honorarium of two pounds
a week, and were willing to give me a three years’
agreement. They were frank enough to acknowledge
that their journal was likely to die of ‘superiority
to its public,’ long before the three years
were over; but, barring this disaster, they gave me
assurance of regular employment. This was the
very thing for me. One could write about books
anywhere. I thankfully closed with the offer
and began to study the ha’-penny evening papers
with assiduity, in order to learn the craft of manufacturing
biographies of living authors.

The greatest of all questions was thus settled:
I should not starve. But the question of a local
habitation remained as difficult as ever. I went
upon wild-goose chases innumerable; was the victim
of every kind of chance hint; gathered fallacious
information from garrulous third-class passengers
on many railways; confided my case to carters and
rural postmen, who played upon my innocence with genial
malice; stayed so long at village public-houses without
visible motive that I incurred the suspicion of the
local constabulary, and on one memorable occasion
found myself identified with a long watched-for robber
of local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some
quaint village that, from a pictorial point of view,
seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my tale,
that I wished to settle in it, universally derided.
No one could conceive any sane person as being desirous
of living in a village; the design seemed wholly unaccountable
to people who themselves would have been only too
glad to live in towns.